Wei Luk glanced at the smiling picture of Peter Po and then stepped over to the receptionist, a beautifully made-up young woman with an expensive coiffure and long, painted nails. She gave Wei and his friends a dazzlingly professional smile.
Their pistols were in their pockets, so they looked presentable enough. Wei Luk smiled, told the girl that he had an appointment with Peter Po.
“And these other gentlemen?”
“Them too.”
She picked up the phone, pushed a button, waited a bit, then asked his name. He gave it.
“At the end of the hallway take a right,” she told him after she had talked to Mr. Po, “then it’s the third door on the left.”
The girl pointed toward a green steel door with a small window. She unlocked it with a hidden button as Wei Luk pushed.
Po welcomed them into his office. He was wearing the television uniform, a suit and tie.
“I thought there was a guard,” Wei Luk said.
Peter Po nodded. “I told him today would be a good day to stay home sick, and he agreed.”
“Okay.”
Peter Po looked at his watch. “When do you think?”
“I don’t know. When the truck delivers weapons and more men, then and only then.”
Fortunately Governor Sun had not yet realized that the rebellion had begun, so no one at City Hall had sent police or troops to secure the one operating television station or shut it down. A rebel broadcast would cause them to cure this error as quickly as possible, however. Until an armed force could be resisted, the rebels thought it wise to hold their tongue.
Yet the rebels were now inside and the police and army were out. Peter Po had a script and knew how to run the equipment in the building so that the rebel leadership could talk to the people of Hong Kong.
Wei Luk’s orders were to ensure that the police and soldiers stayed out of the building, to the last man. “Fight until there are no bricks left stuck together,” Wu Tai Kwong had told him.
“Take your places,” Wei told his men now. He directed one of the men to go back to the lobby and sit with the receptionist.
“Let no one else through the door. Call when the truck arrives.”
The crowd in the Central District of Victoria chanted anti-government slogans, sang snatches of songs, surged along the streets carrying everyone with them, a giant human river.
The crowd came to a stop against the ring of PLA troops that surrounded the Bank of the Orient square. There were five hundred soldiers in the streets around the plaza, all armed with assault rifles and wearing riot-control shields and face masks. The trucks that had delivered them there were parked on the streets inside the military perimeter.
At the four corners of the plaza the officer in charge, Tang’s number two, Brigadier General Moon Hok, had ordered machine guns placed in nests built of sandbags. In the center of the plaza he had placed two tanks. Between them sat a command car bristling with radio aerials.
General Moon was in the command car when he learned that General Tang might have crashed. While the PLA was attempting to verify why their helicopter had ceased all transmissions, Moon got out of the vehicle and stood looking at the sea of soldiers in the square and the huge buildings that surrounded it.
From a military point of view, the position was not a good one. The buildings were man-made high points that would afford an enemy excellent positions from which to shoot down into the square, creating a killing zone.
He called a colonel over, told him to assign squads to search each of the buildings adjoining the square. The colonel walked away to make it happen.
As Moon Hok listened to the noise of the boisterous crowd echoing through the urban canyons and the radio noise emanating from the command car, he decided to use his troops to push the crowd back one block in all directions, thereby putting the buildings that faced the square within his perimeter. Tang had told him to bring no more than five hundred men this morning because the square wouldn’t physically hold any more; now he was contemplating holding nine blocks with the same five hundred men. They would be thin, very thin.
What if the crowd rioted, got completely out of control?
Could Tang be dead?
The noise of the crowd made the hair on the back of Moon Hok’s neck rise.
He got on the radio and called for another five hundred men to join him. It would be hours before they arrived from Kowloon, but better late than never.
When Virgil Cole designed the Sergeant York units, he realized that the volume of data flowing from the sensors would require that each unit be individually monitored. Since a network was only as good as the data its sensors fed into it, he didn’t trust a computer to make life-or-death decisions. The U.S. Army planners didn’t want people completely removed from the loop, either. Consequently, part of the York system was a mobile command and control trailer where the people who monitored each unit sat at individual stations. Here a mainframe computer checked the sensor data and suggested possible courses of action to the human operators.
The trailer had also been on the C-5 Galaxy that delivered the York units and was now parked in an alley three blocks from the Bank of the Orient. Despite the fact that power cables led to it from mobile power units parked nearby, the trailer was gaily painted with surprisingly good graphic art. A sign on the side proclaimed the trailer to be a mobile museum exhibiting the latest in computer technology, sponsored by a well-known philanthropic organization dedicated to the education of the world’s children.
Cole had huddled with the Scarlet Team members this morning, telling them what he knew of other team efforts throughout China. He repeated the litany of woes that the minister in Beijing had recited to Governor Sun, ticking them off on his fingers. “The government is inundated with troubles this morning,” he said in summation. “The population is getting out of control in most of the major Chinese cities. Beijing is beginning to suspect that revolution is in the wind. When the people see how fragile the government’s control is, the rebellion will spread.”
“Wu Tai Kwong has done his work well,” someone commented.
“We must do ours equally well,” Cole shot back and went to check the sensor data feeds from each York unit. Six monitors were arranged in a row, all six labeled from left to right: Alvin, Bob, Charlie…
Kerry Kent stood beside him, comparing her handheld tactical controller with the main monitor.
Satisfied, she stood back, took a deep breath.
“Worried?” Cole asked.
“Only about Wu,” she replied. “This will go fine. You’ll see. You built good stuff.”
Cole waved the compliment away. “I won’t authorize a transfer of money to Wong’s account until Jake Grafton sees Wu and Callie Grafton in the flesh and calls me — they leave together when the Swiss have got the loot.”
“Does Wong know that?”
“I told him when he called earlier. The bastard threatened to hack off more fingers, but we have no choice. We must be tough, insist on fair dealing, or the son of a bitch will take the money and kill them, sure as shootin’.”
Kerry Kent took a deep breath. “When?”
“Tomorrow night is the earliest I could set up the wire transfer. We have to do it while the Swiss bank is open; they don’t stay late for anybody.”
The two-way radio had been busy all morning. Now the man monitoring it signaled to Cole. “The convoy has cleared the harbor tunnel.”
“Cleared the tunnel, aye,” Cole acknowledged.
He keyed the intercom mike on his headset. “The convoy has cleared the harbor tunnel. All units check in.”
The operator at each monitor sang out, “Alvin ready,” “Bob ready,” and so on, in order.
Kerry Kent took control. “We are ready, Mr. Cole.”